EXCLUSIVE: Emails show Theresa Tam considered quarantine before 'pandemic'
Thanks to the ArriveCAN app, roughly 10,000 people were wrongly ordered into quarantine — by glitch, by mistake, by bureaucratic screw-up, and by a corrupt contractor cashing in.
In early February 2020 — one month before there was any declared global pandemic — Canada’s top public health official at the time, Dr. Theresa Tam, was already debating whether the government could force people into quarantine. This was in internal government emails recently obtained through access filings.
And her conclusion was blunt. She wrote that the science didn’t actually support it.
Her exact words:
“If we go to the point of asking people in Hubei to self isolate we have to cheat that science is not robust [on] the transmission during incubation period.”
"Cheat that science." Not follow the science. Not trust the science. Cheat it. She was honest in emails she thought would never see disinfectant of sunlight.
She also admitted the evidence was shaky:
“Science is not robust [on] the transmission during incubation period.”
And even with that weak evidence, she worried about how hard it would be to justify:
“Operationally very difficult to do.”
At the time, they weren’t talking about millions of people. They were talking about travellers from Hubei, China. How many?
Her email says:
“I think we get approx 60 a day.”
Sixty. And even then, she was uneasy. Uneasy about the optics. Uneasy about the evidence. Uneasy about the science. So keep that in mind.
Because a short time later, that same government had no trouble ordering thousands of Canadians into quarantine. Not just travellers. Canadians coming home. Canadians going to work. Canadians trying to see family.
And thanks to the ArriveCAN app, roughly 10,000 people were wrongly ordered into quarantine — by glitch, by mistake, by bureaucratic screw-up, and by a corrupt contractor cashing in.
Sixty people a day was too much when the science wasn’t solid and those travellers were from China. But 10,000 Canadians falsely confined?
That was suddenly “public safety.” Which is why I never bought the line that this was about “following the science.” The country’s own chief public health officer admitted in writing that the science didn’t support what they wanted to do.
They weren’t following it. They were cheating it by their own words. And the people who paid the price weren’t the bureaucrats who wrote those emails. It was ordinary Canadians.
People who lost jobs, missed funerals, shut down businesses, or were treated like criminals for asking basic questions. The people who questioned it were punished. The people who said they had to “cheat the science” were promoted, protected, and never held to account. That’s the part people shouldn’t forget.
And that’s exactly why the trust is gone. Because when your own words are “we have to cheat that science,” you don’t get to pretend this was ever about science at all.
Sheila Gunn Reid
Chief Reporter
Sheila Gunn Reid is the Alberta Bureau Chief for Rebel News and host of the weekly The Gunn Show with Sheila Gunn Reid. She's a mother of three, conservative activist, and the author of best-selling books including Stop Notley.
COMMENTS
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Bruce Atchison commented 2026-01-28 19:39:36 -0500The issue is never the issue. Leftists needed something to panic the sheeple. A pandemic was just the thing to make people afraid of one another. It even drove some folks crazy. Four years after the trucker rebellion, these globalist forces still want to rule us like serfs. They have utter contempt for us and they fear us. So they make citizens dependent on government hand-outs so they’ll be afraid to vote out their handlers.
